


You've Got Me

by ardour



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sheriarty - Freeform, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 16:36:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1990017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardour/pseuds/ardour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim gets hurt, Sherlock rescues him and whisks him away to his bed. Jim sends for his doctor because no way will he let Sherlock near his precious body with a surgical needle, developments develop, you know the drill. The plot's as thin as air, everything's fluff, utter fluff, repulsively fluffy fluff. Smut to follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Got Me

“Tell me a story, Sherlock.”

Sherlock stood by the window, bemused for a moment; and then, seeing no reason why he shouldn’t obey the voice that issued from the pillows arranged along the headboard, he dragged a chair across his bedroom floor and sat down by the bedside of the man the newspapers called his nemesis. The man’s voice was soft and confident, yet somewhat breathless, betraying the fact that his small, tense frame had been sorely damaged. His eyes were closed, his expression difficult to read.

Sherlock watched his body for signs of pain, but the only thing he could trust was the uncanny stillness of the man’s legs parallel under the bed sheet. James Moriarty was hurt, and exhausted. Yet still he sat upright against Sherlock’s pillows, with the regal posture of a man who had watched hundreds do his bidding, yellow bruises turning dark on his pale arms.

“I don’t know any bedtime stories.”

The pause that followed lasted only a few moments, but it troubled Sherlock. The man he knew was always ready with a clever reply; smiled like a cat half asleep in a golden pool of sunlight; raged like Lucifer mustering his demons against the Kingdom of Heaven. This injured man was slow to speak, and he hardly moved at all.

Sherlock waited for Moriarty to demand a story, to taunt him for his lack of imagination, to ask him what was the point of hunting criminals day and night, if he didn’t even have a good story to show for it? He waited for Moriarty’s irritation and contempt and misery. But it didn’t come. That face, which appeared to shine with an unhealthy feverish light against the pillows, eased gently from a frozen lack of expression into a deep composure that might have held any number of emotions. 

To anyone else Moriarty’s stillness would have been forbidding, but for Sherlock it was a welcoming look. For once, Moriarty wasn’t challenging him to make his move, or forcing him through an explanation of his deductions. Sherlock didn’t know what his enemy wanted, yet — but he knew Moriarty’s ways well enough to guess that he wanted something new.

“Tell me something… about yourself,” said the strange familiar, and he opened his eyes just a sliver. Those dark irises swivelled round and rested on the detective’s face. He looked like a child, thought Jim, a grown-up child who still had so much to learn: puzzled brow, his cheeks pink from lifting Jim up the stairs, wobbling uncertainty in his bottom lip.

Sherlock sat in his shirtsleeves and bare feet, half conscious of the cars and people down below on Baker Street, and held the man’s gaze. Silent but not empty, the passing seconds itched and murmured like the white pages before the beginning.

“There was a — there was a man called Sherlock Holmes. A detective. The police came to him when their work was too difficult, and he helped them. They didn’t pay him, so he kept having to ask his brother for money. But his brother was rich, and guilty, so that was all right.”

The words came out lazily, making their way across his tongue so easily that they seemed almost independent of his mind. Some cryptic energy, interest perhaps, or sympathy, unfolded in Moriarty’s eyes, as though Sherlock’s words cast lights and shadows there.

“I think I know this story,” said Moriarty. His voice was not devoid of humour or gratitude, and as Sherlock continued the story he saw Moriarty smile, a true smile that tugged at the corners of his eyes and brought a warmer light to his face.

“The detective made few allies, and fewer friends. He was not a good friend, himself. One day he was introduced to a soldier recently home from Afghanistan. That soldier was John Watson. John proved himself to be both an ally, and a friend. He shot a man, to keep the detective out of danger.”

“And what happened, then?” Moriarty asked, eyes on Sherlock.

“Do you know, James — may I call you ‘James’?”

“You may, Sherlock. You may even call me ‘Jim,’ if you like.”

“Do you know how I first heard the name ‘Moriarty’?”

Moriarty — or Jim, as we may now call him — laughed to hear Sherlock say the name so deliberately.

“You always say it like _that_. You hardly sound English at all, when you say that name.”

“Is it not your real name? I did suspect—”

Jim raised a warning eyebrow.

“Now Sherlock, I may be your captive, but I’m not going to tell you everything right away. Not while I’m so comfy in here, and you’re telling me a story. Keep going; tell me how you first heard about me.”

“John shot the man — a cabbie, a serial killer, an acquaintance of yours I believe — and he was lying on the floor, dying, bleeding from his shoulder where the bullet was. I bent over him and ordered him to tell me who was paying him to carry out the murders. He wouldn’t answer, even when I shouted and threatened he wouldn’t answer, because he knew that he was going to die very soon anyway, and he wouldn’t go to prison. But I still had time to cause him pain.

"So I stamped on his shoulder, and I bore my weight down on his wound, asking him to give me your name, asking over and over again until he broke. Your name was his last word. He screamed it out. Moriarty! That’s how I heard your name for the first time, James. I wrenched your name from the mouth of a dying man. He’d lost everything: your name was all he had left to give up. It was precious to him, somehow. Even though he wouldn’t live long enough for you to have your revenge, that name was his last stand. If he’d managed to keep it secret from me, that would have been a kind of victory. I suppose he thought I wouldn’t stoop to getting the answer by force.”

“He underestimated you.”

“Yes, I think he did. Normally I wouldn’t have cared so much, but the case was extremely unusual. I haven’t met many sponsored serial killers, as I’m sure you know. And when he told me that you were my ‘fan,’ I thought I could reasonably assume I’d meet more of your clients, and I desperately wanted to know as much as I could.”

“About me.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’ve got me, once and for all. I’m as helpless as that cabbie. Pinned beneath your foot, like an insect. After all you’ve seen me do, do you want to hurt me, Sherlock?”

“Unfortunately, somebody beat me to it. How do you feel?”

“Extremely stiff.”

“Ah.”

“And I’m more than a little relieved.” Jim nodded his head at the curtains, drawn against the bright daylight, and the bedcovers, soft and neat. “This is much nicer than prison, I can assure you. And your flat’s cleaner than I expected. This room is, anyway.”

Sherlock actually blushed.

“I… er, I tidied up in here while you were on the sofa. Ran round and dusted with a bit of paper tissue.”

Jim smiled, again with that unexpected trusting warmth. Sherlock’s stomach twisted nervously before he remembered that Jim was his enemy, and he shouldn’t be tucked up in Sherlock’s bed, and sooner or later he’d have to turn him in to Lestrade, or someone higher up. And John was coming home soon.

John. Oh. Shit. _Shit._

“I imagine that this has already occurred to you,” said Jim, “But what are you going to tell your friend and ally, when he comes home and finds out you’ve got the world’s most wanted criminal in your bed?”

 

*

 

John was not a happy bunny. He started marching down the corridor to the bedroom, and when Sherlock stopped him he put up less of a fight than expected; he just stood there saying, “Moriarty’s _here_? _Here_ , in your _bed?”_

“Yes.”

“You _rescued_ him, and you put him in a cab and brought him here, and you carried him up the stairs and _put him to bed?”_

At this point, just as John was reaching the height of his incomprehension, he caught sight of the pile of clothes Sherlock had moved from his bedroom, shirts and socks and dressing gowns.

“And — and you tidied up! You tidied your fucking bedroom for him! _My God!”_

“John, calm down please, and listen to me —”

“Sherlock Holmes, I am calling the police right now, right this minute —”

“John, shut up.”

John’s outrage left him speechless long enough for Sherlock to get a word in.

“Please John, I need you to promise you won’t turn him in. He’s talking, he wants to talk, and I want to hear what he has to say. I won’t get the chance if we go to the police. He’ll stop talking. He’d keep quiet for ten years, twenty years, I know he would. John.”

Sherlock’s flatmate was staring him boldly in the face, fiercely alert like a dog about to bark. Then he turned and walked back through to the living room. Sherlock followed.

“You’re my friend, so I’ll listen to you now. But I won’t stay in a house with that man. If he stays, I’m going.”

“Something’s different about him now. It’s as though he’s given up, or…. Well, no. I think he’s changed his strategy. If you went in there, you’d see.”

“Perhaps he’s retiring,” John snarled. “What happened, anyway? Who attacked him?”

“He made a mistake. Took a risk and got personally involved with a case. I don’t know why, don’t know the details. I’ll find out. All I know now is, he was in a car with a couple of his clients, discussing a job. The driver dropped off the clients. But on their way back to one of his hiding places, someone forced the car to stop. James didn’t have proper back up —”

“Oh it’s _James_ now, is it?”

“The men who stopped the car were probably rivals of Moriarty’s clients. Perhaps they saw those men coming out of the car and assumed — more or less correctly — that the man in charge was still in the car. They pulled him out, hit him.”

“Did they know who he was?”

“No, they’d have no idea. Probably knew he’d think twice about calling the police, or an ambulance. They gave Ja— gave him a good kicking and left him by the side of the road.”

“That’s what he told you?”

“No, I’ve been informed. He crawled his way through a hedge into the park, found one of my homeless network and asked her to take him to Sherlock Holmes. She hid him. There were witnesses to the beating, you see, and they called the police. But he didn’t want their help, for obvious reasons.”

“Mmmm. And you didn’t take him to the police, because you wanted to have a chat, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“This is ridiculous, fucking _ridiculous,_ but you obviously think you know what you’re doing. Don’t let me stop you. Good luck keeping this a secret from Mycroft. I won’t be surprised if I turn on the telly and see that Baker’s Street’s been blown to smithereens.”

John stood up.

“You won’t call the police?”

“ _I_ won’t call the police, if _you_ don’t let him walk out of here scot-free.”

“Good. And in the meantime, you can stay with that — woman? — you’re dating.”

“Yes, Michelle is a woman. _God_.”

John grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and made to leave.

“And Sherlock? Unless it’s something really, really important, don’t call me. OK?”

“All right.”

Sherlock watched John’s back retreat down the stairs, then went to sit by himself in the living room. He checked his e-mail and read some news articles. After a while he turned off his laptop and listened to the boiler roar into action, the central heating gurgling, and the oddly comforting store of silence that was Jim resting in Sherlock's bedroom at the end of the corridor. It was peaceful. But he didn’t mind. In fact, it was — it was….

Exactly what it was, he didn’t know. For the first time in many years, he found himself dozing in the middle of the day, his head free of buzzing momentary thoughts. His mind was consumed by the thought that his enemy was safe. He, Sherlock, had saved Jim; and more than that, Jim had wanted to be saved.

 _Jim will always be there_ , he thought. There would never be a day when Jim wasn’t there, to answer Sherlock back, to make him think, to be better and cleverer and go further than anyone else dared to go. Jim was safe: he had him. Sherlock daydreamed, playing over and over again the moment when he’d lifted Jim into the cab. His body was surprisingly heavy and limp, but very much alive; like a tiger caught in a trap and shot with a tranquilizer dart, he wouldn’t stay down for long. He looked up at Sherlock, and Sherlock looked down at him, expecting to see bare anger, resentment strong as a punch to the face — but Jim had asked for him, Jim was the only person who really needed him. Jim didn’t hate him, never had.

Then came the moment when Jim looked up and mouthed his name. _Sherlock_.

“You’re here,” he said. _You didn’t betray me._

 _I couldn’t betray you._ “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

 

* 

 

Jim wouldn’t let Sherlock touch him. Sherlock dumped the contents of the medical cabinet at the bottom of the bed — plasters, bandages, arnica, TCP — and glared at Jim, who glared wearily back at him. He looked worse, puffy with red bits. Was that usually a good sign? John would know. Sherlock was an expert on bruises and wounds, of course, but he didn’t know much about making them better. Hopefully, he held up a surgical needle he’d found in the bottom of John’s old work bag.

“No, Sherlock. No way José. You’re used to handling dead bodies, not live ones. I’m not letting you rootle about down there."

Sherlock widened his eyes, trying to look like a trustworthy medical man.

“I do spend a lot of time in hospitals. I watch John sometimes. I think I’d be quite good.”

“Absolutely NOT. Can I borrow your phone? I had to scramble mine back there, in case anyone got their hands on it.”

Sherlock sat on the foot of the bed, and handed Jim his phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“My doctor, silly,” said Jim, dialling the number. “I can trust him. To keep his mouth shut, and give me stitches without giving me an infection as well.”

He held up his finger to keep Sherlock quiet while he was on the phone.

“Hullo. Yes. No, not too bad. I would have called you earlier. Skin’s broken in a couple of places. And my head is _killing_ me. 221B Baker Street. Fine. See you soon.”

Jim gave the phone back to Sherlock. He looked cheerful, despite a blooming black eye and the few square inches of skin grazed off his face when they’d kicked him to the pavement.

“I could do it,” Sherlock insisted. “I’ve got pain medication. Not just aspirin,” he added.

“Oh my, you’re persistent. Steady on,” Jim chuckled. “I can see I’m not the only one who likes to be in control.”

“I just…” Sherlock struggled to find the words, “…wanted to do something for you.”

“You’ve done plenty,” Jim reassured him, and leaned back against the pillows.

"Are you OK?" Sherlock asked, despite having the feeling that he should just shut up and leave.

"Honestly? I feel like shit. I was frightened back there, and it was horrible to feel so... powerless." He shot a look at Sherlock, who nodded. "I think I'll feel frightened again soon. But now I'm here, and you won't let anything happen to me, will you?"

"No," said Sherlock, though it almost stuck in his throat -- he was thinking about Jim in his arms again, and was he mad or would he like to pick Jim up right now and take him God knows where -- and he wanted to make Jim smile so he cast around for something to say, something light and almost meaningless.

"Want to see my harpoon?"

 Jim licked his lips appreciatively, grinned. 

"Not in my present condition. But later, who knows."

Then Sherlock felt suddenly that he'd done it wrong, he shouldn’t be joking, he should try to explain….

“I expect you’re wondering why I didn’t take you to the police.”

Jim studied him.

“No,” he said finally, “I know why you didn’t turn me in. I told you before that you need me, which is still true. But there’s something else, I didn’t know until today. Sherlock, you—”

“No, don’t. Don’t.” Sherlock looked away, and then he stood up and rushed past Jim, making for the door. 

“Sherlock….”

Jim’s voice was the best thing he’d ever heard, open and inviting, no questions, no shame. How was it possible? Jim caught hold of his shirt, and he didn’t tug or pull, only held the fabric loose between his fingers, and Sherlock found himself moving to Jim’s side as though he had no choice in the matter — but he did, he was choosing Jim, body and heart and brain, nothing had ever been more _obvious._

Sherlock was on his knees beside the bed, and Jim’s mouth was warm, and warmer further in, and Sherlock found he could create small sounds of pleasure by pressing his lips here, and there. 

Forgetting Jim’s injuries, he put his hand on the smaller man’s chest and lifted himself up onto the bed.

“Now now, you’ll make me dirty.”

“You’re already dirty.” Which was true, because he’d been lying in a hedge, and then sitting on the back seat of a London cab.

“Mmm. It’s not the best time. We should wait ’til I’m feeling better, don’t you think?”

Sherlock nodded, absorbed in the man who’d fallen down between the pillows. Now that he’d been close to Jim he knew his smell, layer upon layer of skin and sweat and hair and coffee and lingering cologne, and he wanted to smell it again, breathe it in deep from the skin beside Jim’s ear, where it was stronger.

Whatever they were going to do, he could wait. It was enough that Jim was here. He made his enemy comfortable, arranging the pillows and bringing a glass of water. He wished he had something special to put in it, lime or a slice of cucumber. Then he lay down beside Jim, as close as he could without hurting him. Jim put his hand out for Sherlock to take.

“Sorry. Not the best time to be kissing.”

“S’okay.” Laughing, “I liked it a lot. You were quite good, even without all your equipment.”

Sherlock resisted the urge to poke him.

“In fact, if you’re careful, I’ll let you do it again. Quick, before the doctor--”

 

 

 


End file.
